Note: Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied.

This book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies. Heroic doctors and patients fighting dread diseases have thrilled and moved audiences everywhere; amid changing media formats, medicine's moving pictures continue to educate, entertain, and help us understand the body's journey through life. Perennially popular, health and medical media are also complex texts reflecting many interests and constituencies including, notably, the U.S. medical profession, which has often sought, if not always successfully, to influence content, circulation, and meaning. Medicine's Moving Pictures makes clear that health and medical media representations are "more than illustrations," shows their power to shape health perceptions, practices, and policies, and identifies their social, cultural, and historical contexts.Read more...

More than illustrations: early twentieth-century health films as contributors to the histories of medicine and of motion pictures / Martin S. Pernick --
Celebrity diseases / Nancy Tomes --
Syphilis at the cinema: medicine and morals in VD films of the U.S. Public Health Service in World War II / John Parascandola --
Medicine, popular culture, and the power of narrative: the HIV/AIDS storyline on General Hospital / Paula A. Treichler --
Mandy (1952): on voice and listening in the (deaf) maternal melodrama / Lisa Cartwright --
Projecting breast cancer: self-examination films and the making of a new cultural practice / Leslie J. Reagan --
American medicine and the politics of filmmaking: Sister Kenny (RKO, 1946) / Naomi Rogers --
Passing or passive: postwar Hollywood images of Black Physicians / Vanessa Northington Gamble --
From expert in action to existential angst: a half-century of television doctors / Joseph Turow and Rachel Gans-Boriskin --
Hollywood and human experimentation: representing medical research in popular film / Susan E. Lederer --Technicolor technoscience: rescripting the future / Valerie Hartouni.

Abstract:

Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine that explore the rich history of health-related films.Read more...

Reviews

Editorial reviews

Publisher Synopsis

This collection will be indispensable to scholars. --FILM & HISTORY, [Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman] While these essays are focused as stand-alone pieces that individually make a significant contribution to our understanding of representational work in selected media forms, they also point to the need for a more comprehensive view of what still remains essentially uncharted territory in the available histories. --TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE [Julie K. Brown] [A] collection of engaging, original essays . . . [T]hey correct a common but misleading dismissal of medicine's cinematic and televisual depictions as frivolous and inconsequential in comparison with the serious and socially important practice of medicine. --AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW [Kirsten Ostherr] Medicine's Moving Pictures is a welcome contribution in exploring how visual culture has shaped and responded to the changing practice, politics, and promotion of medicine in America. . . [This book] offers a glimpse into the rich and creative scholarship that awaits American historians who venture into the relatively untapped collections of health-related films and television shows produced over a century of America's changing visual and medical culture. --THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY [Gregg A. Mitman] Of particular interest is the well-documented corporate and political give-and-take regarding how a sensitive medical subject will be treated. CHOICE [R.D. Arcari] A consistently illuminating and engaging exploration of medicine's representation in film and television. In the language of Variety, it combines art and box office: a substantive and accessible contribution to cultural and media studies as well as to the history of medicine. --Charles Rosenberg, Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard University Film and television representation of health and medicine is neglected, both as an area of historical study and as a research resource. This collection, ranging as it does from wartime public heath films about syphilis to post-war TV doctors, is therefore to be welcomed. Its interdisciplinary approach helps us begin to decode important areas of twentieth-century American cultural history. --Virginia Berridge, Professor of History, London School of Hygiene and Tropical MedicineRead more...